The Man Who Smiled

  “It’s pure routine,” Wallander said. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you more than that. Except that there’s no question of his being suspected of any crime.”

  “He was an honest man,” Forsdahl insisted. “He thought people ought to lead a simple life and always do the right thing. We talked quite a lot over the years. He would always get angry when we touched on the dishonesty that seems to be common nowadays in society.”

  “Was there really no explanation for why he had committed suicide?” Wallander asked.

  Both Forsdahl and his wife shook their heads.

  “OK,” Wallander said. “Just one more thing. We’d like to take a look at the record books for the final year, if you don’t mind.”

  “They’re in the basement,” Forsdahl said, getting to his feet.

  “Martinsson might call,” Höglund said. “I’d better go get the car phone.”

  Wallander gave her the keys and Mrs. Forsdahl went with her. He heard her slamming the car door without the neighbor’s dog starting to bark. When she returned they all went down into the basement. In a room that was surprisingly big for a basement was a long row of ledgers on a shelf running the whole length of one wall. There was also the old hotel sign, and a board with seventeen room keys hanging on it. A museum, Wallander thought, how touching. This is where they hide their memories of a long working life. Memories of a little hotel that got to a point where it was no longer viable.

  Forsdahl took down the last of their ledgers and put it on a table. He looked up August, then the 26th, and pointed to one of the columns. Wallander and Höglund leaned forward to examine it. Wallander recognized the handwriting. He also thought the letter had been written by the same pen Borman used when he signed the register. He was born on October 12, 1939, and described himself as a county offices accountant. Höglund noted his address in Klagshamn: Mejramsvägen 23. Wallander did not recognize the street name. It was probably one of the housing estates that had sprung up after he had left. He turned back to the records for June, and found Borman’s name there again, on the day that the first of the letters had been mailed.

  “Do you understand any of this?” Höglund said, quietly.

  “Not a lot,” Wallander said.

  The mobile phone rang, and Wallander nodded to indicate she should answer it. She sat down on a stool and started writing down what Martinsson had to say. Wallander closed the ledger and watched Forsdahl return it to its place. When the call was finished they went back upstairs, and on the way Wallander asked what Martinsson had said.

  “It was the Audi,” she said. “We can talk about it later.”

  Wallander and Höglund prepared to leave.

  “I am sorry we’re here so late,” Wallander said. “Sometimes the police can’t wait.”

  “I hope we’ve been of some help,” Forsdahl said. “Even though it’s painful to be reminded of poor old Lars Borman.”

  “I understand how you feel,” Wallander said. “If you should remember anything else, please call the Ystad police.”

  “What else is there to remember?” asked Forsdahl, in surprise.

  “I don’t know what it might be,” Wallander said, shaking hands.

  They left the house and got into the car. Wallander switched on the interior light. Höglund had taken out her notebook.

  “I was right,” she said, looking at Wallander. “It was the white Audi. The number didn’t fit the car. The license plate had been stolen. It should have been on a Nissan that hasn’t even been sold yet. It’s registered with a showroom in Malmö.”

  “And the other cars?”

  “All in order.”

  Wallander started the engine. It was 11:30, and there was no sign of the wind dropping. They drove out of town. There was not much traffic on the highway. And there were no cars behind them.

  “Are you tired?” Wallander said.

  “No,” she replied.

  “In that case let’s stop for a while,” he said. He drove into a twenty-four-hour gas station with an attached café that was just south of Helsingborg. “We can have a little late-night conference, just you and me, and see if we can figure out how far we got this evening. We can also see what other cars stop. The only one we don’t need to worry about is a white Audi.”

  “Why not?”

  “If they do come back they’ll be using a different car,” Wallander said. “Whoever they are, they know what they’re doing. They won’t appear twice in the same car.”

  They went into the café. Wallander ordered a hamburger, but Höglund didn’t want anything. They found a seat with a view of the parking area. A couple of Danish truck drivers were drinking coffee, but the other tables were empty.

  “So, what do you think?” Wallander said. “About an accountant with the county offices writing threatening letters to a couple of lawyers, then going out to the forest to hang himself.”

  “It’s hard to know what to say,” she said.

  “Try,” Wallander said.

  They sat in silence, lost in thought. A truck from a rental firm pulled up outside. Wallander’s burger was called; he got up to get it and returned to the table.

  “The accusation in Borman’s letter is injustice,” she said. “But it doesn’t say what the injustice was. Borman wasn’t a client. We don’t know what their relationship was. In fact, we don’t know anything at all.”

  Wallander put down his fork and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “I’m sure you’ve heard about Rydberg,” he said. “An old detective inspector who died a couple of years ago. He was a wise bird. He once said that police officers always tend to say they know nothing, whereas in fact we always know a lot more than we think.”

  “That sounds like one of those pearls of wisdom they were forever feeding us at college,” she said. “The kind we used to write down and then forget as quickly as possible.”

  Wallander was annoyed. He did not like anybody questioning Rydberg’s competence. “I couldn’t care less what you wrote down or didn’t write down at the police academy,” he said. “But at least pay attention to what I say. Or what Rydberg said.”

  “Have I made you angry?” she said, surprised.

  “I never get angry,” Wallander said, “but I think your summary of what we know about Lars Borman was poor.”

  “Can you do any better, then?” she said, her voice shrill again.

  She’s thin-skinned, he thought. No doubt it’s a lot harder than I think to be a lone woman among the Ystad detectives.

  “I don’t really mean your summary was poor,” he said. “But I do think you’re overlooking a few things.”

  “I’m listening,” she said. “I know I’m good at that.”

  Wallander slid his plate to one side and went to get a cup of coffee. The Danish truck drivers had left, leaving the two police officers as the only customers. A radio could be heard faintly from the kitchen.

  “It’s obviously impossible to draw any reliable conclusions,” Wallander said, “but we can make a few assumptions. We can try fitting a few pieces of the puzzle together and see what they look like, see if we can work out a motive perhaps.”

  “I’m with you so far,” she said.

  “Borman was an accountant,” Wallander said. “We also know that he seemed to be an honest, upright man. That was the most characteristic thing about him, according to the Forsdahls. Apart from the fact that he was quiet and liked reading. In my experience it’s quite rare for anybody to start by categorizing a man like that. Which suggests he really was a passionately honest man.”

  “An honest accountant,” she said.

  “This honest man suddenly writes two threatening letters to the Torstenssons’ law firm in Ystad. He signs them with his own name, but he crosses out the name of the hotel on one of the envelopes. This provides us with several assumptions we can deduce.”

  “He didn’t want to be anonymous,” Höglund said. “But he didn’t want to involve the hotel in the business. An honest man upset about inj
ustice. The question is, what injustice?”

  “Here we can make my last assumption except for one,” Wallander said. “There’s a missing link. Borman wasn’t a client of the Torstenssons’, but there might have been somebody else, somebody who was in contact both with Borman and with the law firm.”

  “What does an accountant actually do?” Höglund said. “He checks that money is being used properly. He goes through receipts, he certifies that the proper practices have been adhered to. Is that what you mean?”

  “Gustaf Torstensson gave financial advice,” Wallander said. “An accountant makes sure the rules and regulations are obeyed. The emphasis is a bit different, but an accountant and a lawyer in fact do very similar things. Or should do.”

  “And your last assumption?” she said.

  “Borman writes two threatening letters. He may have written more, but we don’t know that. What we do know is that the letters were simply put away in an envelope.”

  “But now both the lawyers are dead,” Höglund said, “and someone tried to kill Mrs. Dunér.”

  “And Borman committed suicide,” Wallander said. “I think that’s where we should begin. With his suicide. We have to get in touch with our colleagues in Malmö. There must be a document somewhere that rules out the possibility that the death was murder. There has to have been a doctor’s certificate.”

  “There’s a widow living in Spain,” she said.

  “The children are presumably still in Sweden. We must talk to them as well.”

  They stood up and left the café.

  “We should do this more often,” Wallander said. “It’s fun talking to you.”

  “Even though I don’t understand anything,” she said, “and make poor summaries?”

  Wallander shrugged. “I talk too much,” he said.

  They got back into the car. It was almost 1:00. Wallander shuddered at the thought of the empty apartment that awaited him in Ystad. It felt as if something in his life had come to an end a long time ago, long before he knelt in the fog in the military training ground near Ystad. But he hadn’t figured out what it was. He thought about his father’s painting that he had seen in the house in Gjutargatan. In the old days, his father’s paintings had always seemed to him something to be ashamed of, to be taking advantage of people’s bad taste. It now seemed to him there might be another way of looking at it. Perhaps his father painted pictures that gave people a feeling of balance and normality they were looking everywhere for, but only found in those unchanging landscapes.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” she said.

  “Not sure,” he said vaguely. “I think I’m just tired.”

  Wallander drove on toward Malmö. Even though it was the long way around, he wanted to stick to the main roads back to Ystad. There was not much traffic, and there was no sign of anybody following them. The gusting wind was buffeting the car.

  “I didn’t think that kind of thing happened around here,” she said suddenly. “Being followed by some stranger in a car, I mean.”

  “I didn’t think so either until a few years ago,” Wallander said. “Then things changed. They say Sweden changed slowly and imperceptibly, but I think it was rather open and obvious. If you only knew where to look.”

  “Tell me,” she said, “what it used to be like. And what happened.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” he said. “I just see things from the point of view of the man in the street. But in our everyday work, even in an insignificant little town like Ystad, we could see a change. Crime became more frequent and more serious: different, nastier, more complicated. And we started finding criminals among people who’d previously been irreproachable citizens. But what set it all off I have no idea.”

  “That doesn’t explain why we have a record for solving crimes worse than practically everywhere else in the world, either,” she said.

  “Talk to Björk about that,” Wallander said. “It keeps him awake at night. I sometimes think that his ambition is for the Ystad force to make up for the rest of the country put together.”

  “But there must be an explanation,” she insisted. “It can’t just be that the Swedish force is undermanned, and that we don’t have the resources which everybody talks about without anybody being able to say what they actually should be.”

  “It’s like two different worlds meeting head-on,” Wallander said. “Many police officers think as I do, that we got our training and experience at a time when everything was different, when crime was more transparent, morals were clearer, and the authority of the police unchallenged. Nowadays, we need a different kind of training and different experiences in order to be as efficient. But we don’t have that. And the ones who come after us, such as you, don’t as yet have much chance to influence what we do, to decide where our priorities should lie. It often feels as if there’s nothing to stop criminals getting even further ahead of us than they are already. And all society does in response is to manipulate the statistics. Instead of giving the police rein to solve every crime committed, a lot of them are just written off. What used to be considered a crime ten years ago is now judged a noncrime. Things change by the day. What people were punished for yesterday can be something nobody thinks about twice today. At best it might spark off a report that then disappears in some invisible shredder. All that’s left is something that never happened.”

  “That can’t be good,” she said hesitantly.

  Wallander glanced at her. “Who said that it was?”

  They had passed Landskrona and were approaching Malmö. An ambulance passed them at high speed, blue light flashing. Wallander was tired. Without really knowing why, just for a moment he felt sorry for the woman sitting beside him. Over the coming years she would constantly have to reassess her work as a police officer. Unless she was an exceptional person, she would experience an unbroken sequence of disappointments, and very little joy.

  He had no doubt about that. But he also thought that the reputation that had preceded her seemed to be true. He could remember Martinsson’s first year when he’d just graduated from the police acdem and joined the Ystad force. He had not been much use then, but now he was one of their best detectives.

  “Tomorrow we’ll make a thorough assessment of all the material we have,” he said in an attempt to cheer her up. “There must be a chance of breaking through somewhere along the line.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she said. “But one of these days things could get so bad here that we start to regard certain types of murder as incidents that are best left alone.”

  “If that happens, the police force will have to mutiny,” Wallander said.

  “The police commissioner would never go along with that.”

  “We’ll rise up when he’s out of the country eating fancy dinners in the name of PR,” Wallander said.

  “We’ll have plenty of opportunities, then,” she said.

  The conversation died out. Wallander stayed on the highway to the east of Malmö, concentrating on the road with only the occasional vague thought about what had happened during the day.

  It was when they had left Malmö behind and were heading for Ystad on the E65 that Wallander suddenly had the feeling that something was wrong. Höglund had closed her eyes and her head had sunk down on one shoulder. There was no sign of headlights in the rearview mirror.

  He was suddenly wide awake. I’ve been on the wrong track, he thought. Instead of establishing that we weren’t being followed, I should have been wondering why. If Ann-Britt Höglund was right, and I have no reason to doubt that somebody has been following us from the moment we left the police station, then the absence of a car behind us could indicate that they no longer considered it necessary.

  He thought about the mine in Mrs. Dunér’s garden.

  Without a second thought he braked and pulled up on the hard shoulder with his hazard lights blinking. Höglund woke up. She stared at him drowsily.

  “Get out of the car,” Wallander said.

  ??
?Why?”

  “Do as I say,” he shouted.

  She flung aside her seat belt and was out of the car before he was.

  “Take cover,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, as they stood staring at the warning lights. It was cold, and the wind was gusty.

  “I don’t know,” Wallander said. “Maybe nothing. I got worried because nobody was following us.”

  He did not need to explain further. She understood right away. That convinced Wallander on the spot that she was already a good police officer. She was intelligent, she knew how to react to the unexpected. But he also felt for the first time in ages that he now had somebody with whom he could share his fear. On that stretch of hard shoulder, just before the Svedala exit, he had the feeling that all that endless walking up and down the beach at Skagen had come to an end.

  Wallander had been sufficiently alert to take the car phone with him. He started to dial Martinsson’s number. “He’ll think I’ve gone out of my mind,” he said as he waited for a reply.

  “What do you think’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know. But people who can bury a mine in a garden in Sweden would have no problem doing something to a car.”

  “If it’s the same people,” she said.

  “Yes,” Wallander said. “If it’s the same people.”

  Martinsson answered. Wallander could tell that he was half asleep.

  “It’s Kurt,” he said. “I’m on the E65 just outside Svedala. Ann-Britt’s here with me. I’d like you to phone Nyberg and ask him to come out here.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “I want him to have a look at my car.”

  “If your engine’s dead you could call for roadside assistance,” Martinsson said, puzzled.

  “I don’t have time to explain,” Wallander said, and could feel his irritation rising. “Do as I say. Tell Nyberg he should bring with him equipment to test whether I’ve been driving around with a bomb under my feet.”

  “A car bomb?”

  “You heard.”